Jason Zengerie has a very good profile of Malcolm Gladwell in this week’s New York Magazine. Gladwell has been receiving a lot of press lately in advance of the publication of his new book, Outliers. Most of it is as fluffy as the critics who assail Gladwell. But Zengerie’s piece is actually well-written and pulls some excellent lines out of Gladwell. My favorite one is the following:
Google is the answer to the problem we didn’t have. It doesn’t tell you what’s interesting or what’s important. There’s still more in the library than there is on Google.
[…] that actually matter. I think Malcolm Gladwell was right, in many ways, when he called Google “the answer to a problem we didn’t have.” But I don’t think I’ve heard anyone convey the problem as powerfully as Smith does in […]
Pingback by Zadie Smith: The Internet is an absolute disaster for writers | The litter in littérateur. — 5/1/2009 @ 8:20 am